By all accounts, Michael "Imaqtpie" Santana is living every esports professional's dream. He may have retired from pro-level League of Legends play in 2014, but his Twitch stream has 1.6 million followers and pulls an average of 30,000 concurrent viewers, while his YouTube channel has more than a million subscribers. According to Santana's management company Everyday Influencers, this huge collective audience generates $2 million a year in earnings for him, and that's before you factor in any sponsorship money. This is the type of success that others in the scene can hardly fathom: after last year's TwitchCon, Santana's former teammate William "Scarra" Li says Santana treated him and a group of close friends to the nicest meal he's ever had, complete with gold-plated dishes and a per-person tab that Li guesses had to have run at least $300.

All of this money is made from the comfort of Santana's living room PC, where he plays League for 10 hours a day in his trademark outfit: gym shorts and a white t-shirt. The casual look and Santana's long, shiny mane are key to his broad appeal, but if you watch his stream, it's easy to see the other areas where he stands out. Unlike other pros who simply regurgitate memes to sound funny, Santana works them like clay, whether he's spitting Kanye-inspired "I miss the old QT" bars in the middle of a game, or welcoming a new subscriber into what he calls "The Big Dick Club." That he's legitimately funny is already enough to set Santana apart from the crowd, but on top of that, he's got a very particular taste in music, ditching the royalty-free EDM that other League streamers default to in favor of top-shelf rap from artists like Pusha T, Migos, and A$AP Rocky. He's laid back, he doesn't get too salty on stream, and he's really damn good at League of Legends.

At 25-years-old, those qualities have earned Santana much in the way of conventional success: a gorgeous house in Silver Spring, Maryland, where he lives with his long-time partner and fiancee Lisha Wei and their three pets, Smallcat, Mellowcat, and Dapperdog. But for all that success, Santana sounds restless, even hungry, when I ask him about the future. "Sometimes I wish that I could play in the LCS and play some competitive games... I miss that a lot. Who knows. Maybe one day, I'll try to return to it, but for the foreseeable future, I don't see it happening."